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Monthly Archives: May 2009
Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice” in the Light of Bruce Hornsby’s “Mandolin Rain”
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Tagged bruce hornsby, Jane Austen, life, literature, love, poetry, pride and prejudice, romance
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Dr. George Tiller Was Guilty of “Nazi stuff”: Did Bill O’Reilly Cross a Line with His Dr. George Tiller Rhetoric, Implying That He Should Be Stopped By Any Means Necessary?
Would it have been murder to kill Auschwitz’s Dr. Josef Mengele? Salon today reminds us that Bill O’Reilly equated Dr. George Tiller with Nazi-levels of atrocity: Tiller’s name first appeared on the Factor on February 25, 2005. Since then, O’Reilly … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged abortion, abortion rights, Auschwitz, dr. george tiller, dr. josef mengele, feminism, libertarian, naral, rhetoric, women's rights
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Shakespeare, Ayn Rand, and the Murder of Abortion Clinic Physician, Dr. George Tiller
The Kansas abortion clinic physician, Dr. George Tiller, was murdered today in a church. It’s hard to imagine a more animalistic and nihilistic gesture than to enter a church to murder someone, and it put me in mind of a … Continue reading
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Tagged abortion, abortion rights, Ayn Rand, dr. george tiller, feminism, Hamlet, James Dobson, philosophy, pro-choice, pro-life, Shakespeare, women's rights
5 Comments
Mental Health Break for a Sunday
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Tagged christopher cross, fantasy, life, meditation, mental health break, music, oceanic feelings, sailing, Sunday, the oceanic, Zen
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Quote for a Sunday
Bryan Appleyard on contemporary religion and this modern world: Andrew Brown reports on the rise of Calvinism in China. I don’t think that was in the secular-progressive game plan. It gives a timely endorsement to this book review by John … Continue reading
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Tagged agnostic, apologetics, atheist, bryan appleyard, humanism, philosophy, psychology, religion, Richard Dawkins
1 Comment
Was George Orwell a Clear-Headed Critic of Literature, or Was He Hopelessly Confused About It?
Perhaps something in between. At the New Statesman website, New Yorker staff writer, Keith Gessen, discusses the tensions and contradictions in George Orwell’s writings on literature and the arts. One of the examples that he offers is Orwell’s evaluation of … Continue reading
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Tagged criticism, essays, George Orwell, literary criticism, literature, poems, poetry, Politics, T.S. Eliot, writing
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God is Coke? Is the American Model of God Marketing Spreading Globally?
If religion (as Marx said) is the opiate of the people, then that means that, like Coca-Cola, it can be packaged and marketed to targeted audiences, doesn’t it? John Gray, in a review of a new book (God is Back by … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged agnostic, America, atheist, Christianity, coke, God, Hinduism, Islam, John Gray, opium, religion
2 Comments
You Are Here
NASA produced “universe extension timeline”: This is the universe we live in. And there might be others. See here and here.
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Tagged astronomy, Big Bang, creation, evolution, Genesis, multiverse, NASA, physics, space, time, universe
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Bearing Witness to the Holocaust: Salon Asks Barack Obama’s Great Uncle About His Role in the Liberation of Ohrdruf Camp During World War II
Salon recently interviewed Barack Obama’s 84 year old great uncle, Charles Payne. Obama’s uncle, a veteran of World War II, helped to liberate Ohrdruf, a subcamp of Buchenwald. Here’s the part of the interview in which he describes what he witnessed … Continue reading
Poem for a Weekend: Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Fish”
I caught a tremendous fish and held him beside the boat half out of water, with my hook fast in a corner of his mouth. He didn’t fight. He hadn’t fought at all. He hung a grunting weight, battered and … Continue reading
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Tagged elizabeth bishop, fish, fishing, lakes, life, nature, ocean, poems, poetry, rivers, science, water
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The Passion of the Detention Students: Whispered Confessions, Tears, and the Gnostic Liberation of Minds, Bodies, and Souls in the 1980s
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Tagged breakfast, breakfast club, confessions, dancing, detention, freedom, gnostic, gnosticism, passion, philosophy, religion
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Mental Health Break
And how about those high sailing and earnest shoulders?
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Tagged breaking up, chicago, first love, life, love, music, psychology
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Biologist PZ Myers v. Calvinist Philosopher Alvin Plantinga: Is the Brain a Reliable Perceiver of Truth? And if Not, Can Scientific Procedures Function, As It Were, as Vitamin Supplements to Our Otherwise Pallid and Unreliable Monkey Brains?
Biologist PZ Myers today fisks Calvinist philosopher Alvin Plantinga’s essay (written last summer) in which Plantinga claims that evolutionary naturalism is not a coherent intellectual position because we can have no confidence that our brains have evolved to reliably discern truth from error, including the … Continue reading
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Tagged Alvin Plantinga, apologetics, biology, brain, creationism, Discovery Institute, evolution, Genesis, philosophy, PZ Myers, science
22 Comments
ARCHETYPAL OVERLOAD! Samsara, Icarus, Nicodemus, The Cynic Diogenes, The Prodigal Son, Kafka’s Hunger Artist, Socrates, Odysseus, Freud’s Oedipal Totem and Taboo Idealized Daddy Memory, and Christian Conversion—All in a Kansas Song! (And Accompanied by a Greek Chorus!)
Really. Listen: Once I rose above the noise and confusion (just to get a glimpse beyond this illusion) I was soaring ever higher, but I flew too high! Though my eyes could see, I still was a blind man. Though … Continue reading
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Tagged archetype, Christian, conversion, diogenes, Freud, Greek tragedy, icarus, Kansas, nicodemus, odysseus, samsara, the prodigal son
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The Moral Animal(s)
Humans are not the lone moral animal? So the Daily Mail reports: Professor Marc Bekoff, from the University of Colorado, Boulder, believes that morals are ‘hard-wired’ into the brains of all mammals. They also provide the ‘social glue’ that allow … Continue reading
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Tagged animals, biology, chimpanzees, evolution, humans, life, morality, morals, psychology
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Prometheus Unbound 